La danza mancata di Eros e Thanatos. Hofmannsthal, Duse e Craig per Elektra

The missed dance of Eros and Thanatos. Hofmannsthal, Duse and Craig for Elektra Eleonora Duse bought the rights for a production of Elektra by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in November 1904, but the play never came to fruition. The rediscovery of the French prose of Elektra, which Hofmannsthal wrote especially for the actress (from the first German version staged by Reinhardt in 1903), was the work of Taglioni in 1977. Cotticelli, Caretti, Mango and Simoncini have already dealt with the failure of this production, attributable to the difficult collaboration between Craig and the divine. It is therefore of no interest here to reconstruct ‘the chronicle of a death foretold’, but rather to understand what information on Duse's acting potential we can derive from this rewriting, identifying the variants from the original text. The German author had provided some stage rules (Szenische Vorschriften), which were first published in 1903 by the magazine ‘Das Theater’. Then there are Craig's pictures for the staging, including two sketches of the costumes and the final dance, a key junction of the entire work. If we compare these sources with the correspondence between the director/scenographer and Count Kessler, director of the entire project, we can guess what mimic-gestural, choreographic and luministic score was intended for Duse, who, by interpreting this Hamletic and Bacchic Elektra, was to take the first step in the theatrical renewal so much desired by Kessler when he decided to bring the three great artists together.